Russian Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies, which bought a $300 million stake in Facebook last year, is preparing to buy stakes in dozens of well-known Internet companies, its chief executive said.

Yuri Milner told the Sunday Telegraph that DST had built up a war chest of more than $1 billion to fund the next stage of its investment strategy and said it was actively looking at companies in Asia, Australia and Britain.

The newspaper said Milner declined to name any of the investment targets but refused to rule out buying a stake in Twitter, the highly popular microblogging site.

There are a few dozen companies globally that we are following, he was quoted as saying. When you do late-stage investment focused on the Internet your universe shrinks dramatically.

DST has also invested in a social commerce website Groupon and it holds a stake in social game company Zynga, which makes games for social networks including Facebook and News Corp's MySpace.

(Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Louise Heavens)

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